Vayable Is A Marketplace For Unique Travel Experiences

Like an Airbnb for travel experiences, secondary market place Vayable launches today to offer travelers the opportunity to buy experiences in exotic locales all over the world, from Rome to Rio as the well worn cliche goes. Founders Jamie Wong and Samrat Jeyaprakash tell me that the key difference between Vayable and that other “Airbnb for experiences” Skyara is that Vayable is targeting travelers specifically, especially those who are tired of the relative banality of activity offerings from travel sites like Orbitz and Expedia.

Wong and Samrat actually met on Airbnb themselves and were roommates for about two weeks when they came up with the idea for Vayable, attempting to provide a solution to the “what do I do once I get there?” travel problem. The service currently has a modest 200 users, but there are still plenty of interesting things to do on Vayable, including a taking Bob Dylan Walking Tour in NYC, joining a local king on a fishing trip in Fiji or indulging in a weekend sailing experience around Cinque Terre in Italy.

“Travel has seen tremendous innovation in flight and accommodation booking, especially with sites such as Hipmunk and Airbnb disrupting the industry. But once their reservations are booked, travelers still rely on old-school (and costly) guidebooks, travel agents and online forums to plan their itineraries. It’s the blind spot of the travel industry,” Jeyaprakash explains.

The site currently has 70 listings and while the offerings are admittedly sparse, activities like Textile design in a sustainable village and a trek through Singalila in India are unique and inspirational enough to become the focal point of trips yet to be planned.

Vayable monetizes by taking a 15% commission from those offering experiences (which you can sign up to provide on the site if you’re a “local expert”) and a 3% from travelers. It also plans on eventual affiliate partnerships with companies who offer accommodations and flight services, eh hem Hipmunk and Airbnb.

Vayable’s grander vision is to become the go-to spot for curated “hi-res” travel experiences, “If a model like ours isn’t implemented, there will be nothing but visits to Starbucks and McDonalds [available for travelers] in 10 years,” Jeyaprakash tells me, exaggerating slightly.

 

Gillmor Gang 4.23.11 (TCTV)

The Gillmor Gang — Danny Sullivan, Doc Searls, John Taschek, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — endured technical glitches and a dissection of the disruption formerly known as TV before settling into a debate about privacy. I know, sounds like the usual nonsense, but this show was high quality nonsense. I forget who brought up the famous iPhone/Android hidden recording file crisis, but things quickly got out of hand when one of us suggested that was a feature not a problem.

It turns out that not that many people are aware that when we are on the Internet, everything is recorded. For those who seem surprised by this, all those free apps are actually there to harvest our clicks, searches, and other gestures of our intent. As Doc Searls pointed out, how else does Google make money except by random clicks on Adsense adding up to billions. It’s only when we can’t figure out how to delete our wanderings that people get upset. Me — I count on being surreptitiously tracked so I can go back and figure out where I was last week.

 

Q&A With Geoff Cook: How We Solved The Chatroulette Porn Problem

At the end of last year, social networking site myYearbook shifted its focus more towards games and introduced a live video chat feature which could have completely backfired. But instead of turning into the next Chatroulette, the site has managed to keep the unwanted live porn vids to a minimum. While Chatroulette still has an estimated nudity rate of 1 in 50 videos, myYTearbook was able to cut its nudity rate down to 1 in a 1,000. In a Q&A with myYearbook CEO Geoff Cook, he explains the strategies he used to get there.

Q: When you decided to add live video chat to your site, what were you thinking? I mean, seriously, what were you thinking?

When we decided to build a Live Video gaming platform, the best example of Live Video at scale was Chatroulette, and it was full of porn. At the time, 1 out of every 10 video streams on Chatroulette was obscene.

Chatroulette was growing in part because it was obscene—it was the accident victim and the public was the rubbernecker. Chatroulette’s traffic peaked in March 2010—the same month that Jon Stewart screamed into the camera “I hate Chatroulette!” to end a segment that would be the service’s high water mark.

While we were bothered by the content, the visceral social experience that Chatroulette represented was compelling. We loved the serendipity of the Next button, and set out to build a service that would allow the promise of the Next button to be realized. A lot of our effort went into matching users based on location, age, and gender in real time while building out a gaming-platform to give them something to do beyond chat. Since launching in January 2011, we’ve grown to 750,000 video chats a day with 100 times less nudity than Chatroulette a year ago.

Q: How did you do it?

The core of our abuse-prevention approach is a system that enables us to capture and analyze thousands of images a second from the hundreds of thousands of daily streams. We sample the video streams of users at random, frequent intervals and then conduct processing—both human and algorithmic—on the resulting images.

Q: What did you find out from this process?

One early finding was that images with faces are 5 times less likely to contain nudity than images without faces. If you’ve ever used Chatroulette, this will make sense as the most common pornography encountered there contains a body part other than, ahem, the face. This is useful information because open-source facial recognition is relatively advanced while other-body-part detection is much less so. As a result, it is possible to use the presence of a face to limit some of the human review problem.

Q: Does the fact that there’s a face in an image mean it’s free of porn?

The mere presence of a face does not make an image clean. In fact, around 20% of nudity-containing streams also contain a face. However, with a lot of effort and additional processing logic including many factors like chat reputation, social graph, motion, etc., we’ve made the presence of a face helpful in determining “safe” images. Of course “safe” images may themselves be a false negative, and so we do human sampling of these images at a lower sample rate than images not marked “safe.”

Q: What happens once a human steps in?

The heart of our human-powered solution is a two-tiered image review organization that enables each individual reviewer to scan 400 images a minute looking for abusive content. Both groups are 24 x 7 x 365. Our goal is to be no more than 5 minutes delayed in reviewing streams.  We have a zero tolerance policy. If two reviewers deem your behavior inappropriate, your account is removed and you are banned from the site forever.  Based on our findings, we believe purely algorithmic approaches to moderation will never provide adequate safety.

Q: How does this compare to what Chatroulette is doing?

As our product has grown, we’ve noticed Chatroulette make some progress in reducing their nudity problem as well.  On a recent night, a review of 1,500 Chatroulette video streams yielded a 1.9% abuse rate—or roughly a 1 in 50 chance of encountering nudity on any click of the Next button. This compares to a less than 1 in 1000 chance on myYearbook.

Q: Why the order-of-magnitude discrepancy?

myYearbook requires a login. While much has been made of Facebook Connect as an identity-layer that will discourage abuse, we don’t believe the identity aspect plays much of a role per se. Someone who is interested in taking down their pants will do it even on their iPhone in the now-banned iChatr app, which was quickly overrun by abuse, despite the fact that every phone can easily identify you uniquely. The more salient aspect is that there be any login.

Q: What difference does a login make?

So long as there is any login, a user’s device can be blocked—and we’ve found people who take down their pants for strangers generally lack a certain je ne sais quoi when it comes to circumventing security systems—unlike, say, spammers. We use a technology called Threatmetrix to fingerprint devices and ban both the user and their physical device when we detect abuse. Threatmetrix helps provide the teeth of our zero-tolerance policy.

Q: Couldn’t you do this with photos also?

Our system for reviewing live video has proven so successful that we are now actively engaged in bringing a similar system to bear on every photo uploaded to myYearbook. In a few months time, we will have perfect insight into every image being posted to the service, and we believe we can make incremental gains there as well by fundamentally turning a report-based system into a pro-active system. Eradicating abuse from user-generated content is a never-ending, human-and-machine-intensive problem that may well spell the difference between success and failure, especially when you are dealing with live video.

Image: Nick Bilton

 

(Founder Stories) How GroupMe Won SXSW: Grilled Cheese

At this year’s overcrowded and overhyped SXSW conference in Austin, one of the few startups to break through the noise was group text messaging app GroupMe. How did GroupMe win SXSW? Grilled cheese. The company rented an outdoor food shack for something like $ 10,000 and turned it into the GroupMe Grill with free grilled cheese sandwiches and beer. The grilled cheese, says co-founder Steve Martocci in this episode of Founder Stories, was “an homage” to Phish concerts, where grilled cheese sandwiches are consumed in large quantities (watch the video above).

The GroupMe Grill became a meeting point for attendees of SXSW, and it was one of the places everyone was taking photos of on Instagram (one of the other “winners” of SXSW). All in all, two million text messages were sent through SXSW groups during the week of the event.

GroupMe wasn’t the only text messaging startup at SXSW. Beluga, Fast Society, Kik, Textplus, Yobongo, and many others were also there in full force. Does all this competition worry the GroupMe founders? In the video below, CEO Jared Hecht says, “It lights a fire under our ass.” But the proliferation of all of these semi-private group texting apps says something about the “broadcast overload” problem on more open social networks where “conversations are sterile.”

Be sure to watch Part I (on how GroupMe got started) and Part II (on where group texting is going) of this GroupMe interview. You can also check out other previous episodes of Founder Stories or subscribe in iTunes. (Disclosure: host Chris Dixon is an investor in GroupMe through Founder Collective).

 

We’re In The Middle Of A Terrible Blubble!

If you’re an early stage venture capitalist or angel investor there is no time like the present to declare a bubble, say valuations are out of control and predict the demise of the tech industry in the very near future. Since they’re in the business of buying low and selling high, any angle that suggests that the buy price should be even lower sounds great to them.

If there’s any evidence of said bubble all the press will eat it up. Mostly because they were out buying Internet stocks in 2000 instead of doing their jobs and reporting on the fairly obvious signals that the Nasdaq was about to implode. They won’t get caught with their pants down and their hand out again. Declare a bubble early and declare it often.

And there is some evidence laying around. Valuations on a few select private tech startups are pretty darn high right now. And valuations on early stage “Series A” startups have surpassed the all important $ 4 million line and are now averaging in the $ 6 million – $ 8 million range.

That’s bad for seed fund economics. Which leads to paragraph 1 above, followed by paragraph 2 in the press.

There are a lot of arguments that whatever is happening today in tech is absolutely nothing like what happened in 1999-2000. If you weren’t in the industry then, it’s understandable that you’d be concerned when you see Facebook being valued at up to $ 70 billion in private transactions. Heck, even I’m concerned when I see companies like SecondMarket holding public auctions for Facebook stock, driving the price ever higher, and private equity firms like Felix Investments out there pitching Twitter stock as a must have to any retiree with a million dollars.

But this isn’t a bubble. It’s more like a Blubble.

A Blubble? Yes, a Blubble. Because there is a lot of whining going on.

The biggest problem in 2000 wasn’t that companies were being formed in triplicate to address the burgeoning pet food home delivery need. Or even that billions of dollars was being invested in new ideas, most of which didn’t work.

No, the biggest problem was that no one had any idea how to value these companies. It was clear by the late 90s that this Internet thing had legs. And everyone wanted to be at the party. People flocked to Silicon Valley to take jobs like “Business Development Manager.” Anyone can be a biz dev executive because it’s not a real job. It’s kind of like sales but you usually don’t have any kind of quota. You just work on “deals.”

Business development, marketing and sales jobs exploded. If you had experience selling anything, or were willing to give it a try, there was a hot new well funded Internet startup that would hire you, pay you at least $ 100k, give you a bunch of stock options and then actually loan you the money to pay for those stock options immediately, getting your long term capital gains period started.

When I left the law firm I was working at I became VP of Business Development the startup I joined, a former client. I was running the sales group too within a few months. I was 29 and had never sold anything in my life. But there I was, doing deals and in the thick of things. My stock options, Morgan Stanley told me, were worth over $ 40 million.

P
A
R
T
Y

That story has a sad ending. I’ll tell you all about it later. Short version is that by 2001 I was basically broke and moved to London where I learned to appreciate drinking heavily at lunch every day because that’s what you did in London.

But back to the Bubble and the Blubble.

The problem in 2000 is that all anyone cared about was revenue. Users and page views were an afterthought. Profit was a pipe dream. But revenue. Now that was something that Wall Street understood and could put a value on. Everything was valued at a multiple of revenue. It didn’t really matter how unprofitable you were. Which is why WebVan, for example, could blow though a billion dollars and be nowhere near profitability and still go public. Everyone lost money on every transaction and nobody cared. Because your stock price was tied to revenue, and when you ran out of money raising another hundred million dollars was nothing more than a fancy powerpoint presentation and a month’s work.

As a lawyer I sat in board meetings for my clients. And in those meetings I saw very well known venture capitalists tell these companies to spend as much money as they could as fast as they could, and then raise a bunch more and spend that as fast as they could. Hire anyone remotely competent who comes in the office, they say, and figure out a way to create revenue. Even, they said, if you have to spend $ 10 to get $ 1 in revenue.

Take the startup I worked at, for example, called RealNames. When I was put in charge of sales I was told to get us from zero revenue to $ 1 million/quarter in revenue. We achieved that goal through hard work and creative accounting. And boom! Morgan Stanley was brought in to take us public. At the first internal meeting for the IPO they told us that we could expect to debut on Nasdaq at a $ 1 billion valuation, and should trade up quickly to a $ 9 billion valuation, which was the market price for Ask Jeeves at the time. I had about half a percent of the company in stock. Thus, my $ 40 million net worth.

That IPO never happened because in March 2001 the Nasdaq crashed. And then all those creative revenue deals fell apart.

In the most innocent cases Company A would buy a bunch of ads or whatever from Company B. Maybe a $ 5 million deal over 24 months. Company B would then buy a bunch of stuff from Company A. Say $ 4 million over 18 months. As long as the deals weren’t mirrors and they were separate and binding contracts the accountants were high fiving everyone.

Everyone was doing those deals, particularly the public companies that absolutely had to keep those revenue numbers up to support their valuations. Note that I haven’t said a word about profits.

Some people, many of whom were subsequently convicted of felonies, were forward thinking enough to begin to hide the fact that these were reciprocal revenue deals. They invested “triangle deals” involving at least three companies so that there were no mirror deals between any two companies. AOL was particularly fond of these deals:

The prosecution alleged that Homestore was engaged in “triangular” deals. That meant it would buy goods from a third-party vendor, the vendor would make a purchase from a counterparty, and the counterparty would then place other companies’ advertising on Homestore’s websites and pay Homestore the remaining revenues.

The indictment said Homestore should not have recognized revenue on any of the transactions but listed the money as revenue on its financial statements. AOL, the decision said, served as the counterparty in 17 transactions included in the indictment.

I once sat in a meeting where a Homestore executive pitched me on participating in one of these deals. Even in the craziness of the 90s, it smelled awful.

So to sum up.

2000 Bubble: Raise at least $ 100 million in venture capital. Spend! Hire everyone (particularly sales people)! Get revenue by any means necessary! Go Public! Sell Your Stock! Run!

2011 Blubble: Drag blubbering angel investors into Series A rounds valuing your company at $ 6 million instead of $ 4 million. Hire engineers, lots of them, as many as you can. Don’t hire non-engineers or other overhead people unless you absolutely have to (thus the dearth of VP Biz Devs around). Balance fast growth with low burn (through cost controls or profitability). If you happen to have started Facebook, Groupon or Zynga, capitalize on your massive profitability by doing big late stage rounds that value you at something like 30x forward profits (which isn’t that crazy). If you’ve founded Twitter and have no revenue, capitalize on the massive worldwide cultural impact you’ve created instead.

But no one. Absolutely no one, is telling startups to raise and spend money as fast as they can. With the possible exception of Color. I have no idea what those guys are up to over there in crazy picture sharing land.

 

 

Firefox 4 About To Hit 100 Million Downloads After A Month

Mozilla released its new Firefox 4 exactly a month ago today and within a day it had more than twice as many downloads as Internet Explorer 9 after its launch. Some where around midnight tonight the browser build will hit 100 million downloads after one month in existence, according to the Firefox download stats ticker.

What’s more impressive is that the browser has now taken over 7.94% of the worldwide browser market according to StatCounter, with Internet Explorer 8.0 at 29.99%, Firefox 3.6 at 24.43% and Chrome 10 at 15.35%.

When compared to the percentages two days after its launch it looks like Firefox 4 has taken a solid chunk out of Firefox 3.6 usage: On March 22 IE had 45% of the global market, followed by Firefox 3.6 with 30% and Chrome with 17%. Firefox 4 was at 1.95% then.

Like Erick I too had stopped using Firefox because it was so excruciatingly slow, and was pleasantly surprised at how much faster 4 was compared to 3.6 and even compared to Chrome when loading Flash heavy sites.

But maybe being speedier isn’t enough to win the high stakes browser wars? On the Firefox 4 launch day, Chrome came out with its Chrome 11 beta, including support for an HTML5 speech input API (which essentially means that you’ll be able to talk to your computer).

Jeez.

 

Eyeglasses by Zenni Optical

One of the most important organs for human is the eyes, if you have eye problems or you are not confident with your eyes then wear a glass eye is one of the answer. Many people spend hundreds and even thousands of dollars for his eye care likes to choose a frame design that suitable with their personality and lifestyle or add prescription lenses with a high-tech coating. But why should spend a lot of money if you can get it all with the cheap price. 

According to an article from The New York Times titled Seeing Straight Without Breaking the Bank, if you want a cheap pair of eyeglasses, just try zennioptical.com, which sells generic frames, including lenses with anti scratch coating online from $ 8, that is the cheapest offer at this time considering the frame average price is $ 118 on the eye care market.  

So many models of eyeglasses you can select, eyeglasses with single vision lens, tinted sunglasses lens, sunsensor (potochromic) lens, bifocal lens and progressive lens. To me Acetate Frame #4412 is the best because the design is cool and stylish. So, if you want to find the best eyeglasses, zennioptical.com is the answer. What you are waiting for, just contact us immediately.

The New Era of Keyboard

The Virtual Laser Keyboard (VKB) is a revolutionary accessory for Blackberry, Smartphone, PDA, MAC & Tablet PC. The VKB comes with an elegant leather jacket, making it the perfect 
business / Christmas gift (and just what you want to take out of your inner suit pocket in front of your amazed business colleagues.

 
When using the VKB settings can be changed either via your laptop, your PC or your compatible Smartphone and PDA:
Sound: controllable Virtual Keyboard sound effects (keyclicks)
Connection: Connection to the appropriate Laptop/PC port
Intensity: Intensity of the projected Virtual Keyboard
Timeouts: coordinated timeouts to conserve the Virtual Keyboard's battery life
Sensitivity: adjustable sensitivity of the Virtual Keyboard
Auto-repeat: Allows the VKB to automatically repeat a key based on prescribed parameters

Where Can I use It:
Personal Digital Assistants (PDA's)
Cellular Telephones
Laptops (MAC compatible)
Tablet PCs
Space saving Computers
Clean Rooms
Industrial Environments
Test Equipment
Sterile and Medical Environments
Transport (Air, Rail, Automotive)

Note : The only keyboard that operates in total darkness

 

Turn Your House Into A Linkbait

A mobile ad network is offering to pay your mortgage for up to a year if you let them turn your house into a billboard for their services. Probably an imaginative and successful linkbait (including a CNN story) more than an actual project, considering the $100,000 budget and all the codes they might have to deal with.  The company is in the process of attracting additional funding.

 

Speaker Bulb Lamp

The future human always want simplicity, this is a very unique design of a bulb that can give 

voice or music (speaker). Wireless speakers are there as are light bulbs, so you basically put 
them together in a rather sophisticated way, citing technological advances as your friend. Wireless speakers streaming music all over the place with the shimmy of disco lights; sounds eccentric! Apparently the parts of the SoundBulb are replaceable and can be upgraded from time to time. 

The question is? How about heat factor,after all bulbs do produce a lot of heat and could be damaging 
to the speakers.

 

Personal Injury Lawyers for You

Are you facing personal injury case and need lawyers services? Just visit this site, they personal injury and accident lawyers who will invest the time and money it takes to win your case. When you take us on as a client we invest our firm's money to prepare the strongest case possible for you and your family.  

We will support your case with the most qualified expert witnesses, videographers to tape testimony in depositions, top notch graphic artists who prepare computer generated displays for court, we back up you with our 14 full time personal injury staff and a substantial settlement or victory in court by our lawyer to win your case. Many complex and difficult cases to court in all over counties like Pennsylvania, New Jersey and New York that we have taken. 

Some of the success we achieve and substantial monetary settlements for our clients as consideration for you, you can read our verdicts & settlements like teenage recovers from Stepmom for fall out from a moving vehicle, $240,000 settlement for 11 year old bicycle rider struck by an automobile and many more.  Most people wait for months or years before filing a suit, please don’t do that, your case can weakens an otherwise strong case. Call us now so that we can collect all the information we need to start building a good case for you. 

 

Wall Street Gives Larry Page A Big -1

Google’s first quarterly earnings with Larry Page back at the helm as CEO of Google didn’t go so well last Thursday. Revenues did rise an impressive 27 percent, but expenses grew an even larger 34 percent, partly due to across-the-board salary raises and ballooning talent retention packages.

The next day, Google’s stock took a nosedive, closing on Friday at $ 530, almost $ 50 below its close on Thursday before the earnings call. More than $ 15 billion of Google’s market value, or about 8 percent, was wiped out, the biggest single-day drop since 2008. This reaction was not solely because Google missed Wall Street consensus earnings estimates by a three cents. It was also because of Larry Page. Wall Street investors fear Larry Page and the unknown changes he may bring to the company, which up until now has been one of the stock market’s most consistent earners.

Page’s performance on the earnings call, or rather lack thereof, compounded these fears. He literally phoned it in, stating a few scripted words at the beginning of the call via telephone before handing it over to his CFO and other executives. Page didn’t even hang around to answer any questions, during a less than stellar quarter when the company is undergoing many changes internally. He would have been better off not even appearing at all.

http://investor.google.com/webcast.html

Page spoke for a few minutes at the beginning of the call, which interestingly is not yet available for replay on Google’s investor relations site. In an unconvincing monotone, he said (from my notes):

We’ve had a tremendous quarter, with 27% revenue growth. Tremendous.

[In terms of the recent management changes], everything worked as expected. I am excited about these exchanges. Eric [Schmidt] is working on governmental and external affairs. I am very excited about Google and our momentum, and also excited about our future. Jonathan Rosenberg is transitioning out. I wanted to thank him for all of his insights. We will clearly miss him, and thank him from the bottom of our hearts.

Schmidt and Rosenberg, the senior V of product management who is leaving Google, used to run the earnings calls. The analysts loved Rosenberg. And throughout the call his praises were sung by other executives as well. Page said nothing substantive about the management changes or the new direction of the company.

The biggest question mark over Google right now is about its social strategy, dubbed +1. But the senior VP in charge of social, Vic Gundotra, was not even on the call. Instead, the call was led on the product sides by Jeff Huber, now head of Local, and Susan Wojcicki, head of Ads.

It’s not that surprising that investors responded by giving Larry Page and Google a big -1. They voted by selling their stock.

And maybe Page is fine with that. He wants to manage Google for the long term, not to please short-term investors. They’ll figure it out eventually. The problem is that doesn’t work unless earnings keep outpacing expectations and the stock keeps going up. If the stock keeps going down instead, then all of a sudden it does matter how Page treats Wall Street. Talent is attracted to rising stocks, and Google needs as much talent as it can lay its hands on to go after social, local, mobile, and other new markets.

 

Game-Based Marketing: Book Review

Contrary to what the authors suggest, your marketing program is not going to be automatically fun if you simply slap points and a leaderboard on it.

In my years in the advertising business, I have amassed a shelf overflowing with books on just about every new thing that came in vogue during the past decade, from Second Life and neuromarketing to crowdsourcing and design thinking. These books are usually a great time saver and a handy reference even if the expiry date on some of these new things arrives before the respective book goes into print.

Gamification, or using principles of game-play design for non-game applications and particularly marketing, is one of the newest new things that has gained prominence in 2010, much to the enthusiasm of marketers and the chagrin of professional game designers. Game-Based Marketing (Wiley, 2010) by Gabe Zicherman and Joselin Linder is a book that attempts to explain how to bridge the gap between a level boss in a first-person shooter and your own boss at your company’s marketing department. To quote a blurb from the dust jacket, “Most importantly, you’ll see how to create game-based marketing plans that measurably increase both sales and profits.”

The authors are not shy about their enthusiasm for gamification, an approach they call Funware: “In short, the future of Funware and game design in business is breathtaking,” they write. Similarly breathtaking is their predictable dismissal of the traditional advertising practices: “In this socially networked, choice-driven world, the old methods of reaching consumers with advertising messages have simply stopped working as well as they need to,” a thesis they chose to illustrate not with data but with a single example of a failed, in their opinion, commercial. Beyond the introduction where these two quotes appear, the book oscillates between numerous similar head-scratchers and occasional moments of brilliance.

The authors’ overview of the Boy Scouts’ system of badges is very timely in this age of Foursquare and services such as Badgeville that offer recognition programs to let website owners direct and reward visitors’ behavior through public acknowledgement of their actions. Their chapter-long overview of frequent flyer programs that they call “The Ultimate Funware” is thorough and provides useful gems such as an observation that shifting direct action-reward relationships (“buy 10 coffees, get 1 free”) to abstract point systems provides marketers with greater scalability of their loyalty programs. The head-scratching moment comes soon after, when on one page the authors rave about how airlines’ frequent-flyer programs create strong customer loyalty only to follow with a photograph of one of the authors’ own reward cards, not fewer than 16. One would also wish that authors had added texture to the book – one that is largely about loyalty programs – by referencing any of the numerous studies on frequent flyer program design published elsewhere over the past two decades.

Marketers working on certain brands will find plenty of unsolicited advice directed squarely at them. Safeway “is missing great opportunities to build game mechanics into a product that everyone loves – food,” while “for a brand like McDonald’s […] it’s going to take more than a million dollar grand prize and some local radio station coverage to fix what ails it.” Whether the advice is sound is left up to the marketers to decide as the authors offer little in the way of factual evidence to support their ideas; whatever might ail McDonald’s hasn’t prevented the company to grow its stock price more than twofold over the past five years.

Ultimately, Game-Based Marketing is not really about games, which is particularly unfortunate for a book whose one author is a “twelve-year game-industry veteran.”  Raph Koster, a famed game designer behind Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies and the author of A Theory of Fun for Game Design -- one of six game-related books Zichermann and Linder cite in their bibliography -- writes that games are about fun, and fun is about challenging players to learn new skills and then stretch themselves in applying these skills to new situations. As a book that introduces and then actively promotes the concept of Funware as a system of “putting fun into everything”, Game-Based Marketing offers no explanation of what fun really is. And herein lies the biggest problem with Game-Based Marketing: contrary to what the authors suggest, your marketing program is not going to be automatically fun if you simply slap points and a leaderboard on it.

If you are looking for an overview of marketing programs that involve rewards and leaderboards, you will find Game-Based Marketing a valuable addition to your collection. If you are looking to borrow design elements that make players spend hours playing video games for your next marketing campaign or other business problems, I recommend Changing The Game (FT Press, 2008) by David Edery and Ethan Mollick, and a presentation “Pawned: Gamification and Its Discontents” by Sebastian Deterding that can be found on Slideshare.

Game-Based Marketing: Inspire Customer Loyalty Through Rewards, Challenges, and Contests (Wiley, 2010) - $15 on Amazon

An edited version of this review for Game-Based Marketing: Inspire Customer Loyalty Through Rewards, Challenges, and Contests appears in the first 2011 issue of The International Journal of Advertising.

 

Metaforic Raises $8 Million To Combat Software Pirates, Hackers

Anti-piracy software maker Metaforic, based in Glasgow, California and Tokyo, has raised $ 8 million in a round led by Scottish Equity Partners. Existing backers Pentech Ventures and the Scottish Investment Bank’s Scottish Venture Fund participated in the round.

Founded in 2006, Metaforic offers two main products: MetaFortress, which helps software developers protect their applications against piracy, subversion and tampering, and MetaSure for secure information storage.

 

Farmville For Dummies

Coming out today: 245 pages of instructions on how to "download the app and start your farm", "create your farmer avatar" and spend hours obsessively clicking on stuff.  Angela and Kyle, my hat's off to your genius. $12.50 on Amazon.

 

8 megapixel camera phone LG-KC780

LG Electronics announced today the launch of its ‘LG-KC780', a slim 8 megapixel camera phone with special features that make it ideal for shooting portraits. The LG-KC780 is a slim slider phone at just 13.9 mm thick, but manages to include a large 2.4-inch widescreen LCD. Schneider-Kreuznach certified lens ensures that the LG-KC780’s camera takes high quality photos that are sharp and clear.

Face Detection automatically finds and focuses on people’s faces to allow photographers to take clearer pictures. The LG-KC780 can almost see in the dark with adjustable light sensitivity up to an amazingly high ISO 1600. If an image is too bright, however, LG’s SmartLight setting automatically fixes it.

Electronic Blackboard Transmits Writing Over Phone Lines (1974)

"A new, experimental system devised by Bell Labs may make an old teaching tool more alluring. Called an electronic blackboard, it uses ordinary (and low-cost) telephone lines to send writing that is chalked on a pressure-sensitive surface to any remote point for TV-screen display. The audio portion of a lecture or other presentation can, if needed, be sent via a second phone line, using a portable conference phone available commercially. The system is being tried out at the University of Illinois."
-- Popular Science, June 1974

 

Imagine The Car

For his masters diploma project conducted in Citroen’s Design Center (ADN), designer Antonin Maire D’Eglise set out to really break some new ground with his C-BIONIC concept. The hypothesis of the project is that in the near future, mankind will have depleted the natural resources so heavily relied upon in the automotive industry. This will lead way to a second renaissance, where de-materialization and genetic science will be used as building blocks in a more humanistic and poetic world.

 

A genetically modified tree is used as the chassis of the vehicle, and the rest of the body is made from highly biodegradable materials. The tree was chosen not just as a symbol of environmental conscience, but because it would require little engineering, and it is renewable. Ironically, instead of creating pollution the tree absorbs carbon dioxide and emits oxygen. Each C-BIONIC has been designed to have a minimal material loss lifecycle of just 3 years, after which it returns to the earth. The only part salvaged is the electric engine which is reused in the next vehicle.

 

Things That Should Have Happened By 2011

When I started to look at predictions for a living back in 2006, I remember how 2011 was this big banner year against which most forecasts were made. I guess partly it was because 2011 was at the end of a five-year horizon, and partly because it was conveniently removed into the next decade. Whatever the reason, I've been patiently waiting for this year to arrive to check back on some of the more feisty predictions made in the outset of the 2.0 boom. And now this time has come.

Some of the stuff below has worked out remarkably -- surprisingly -- well, such as the prediction from Hitachi about commercial availability of mind-machine interfaces (check!). Other stuff -- not so much:  podcast audience was expected to skyrocket  from 11.3% in 2006 to 51.1% in 2010 (eMarketer #084888), but it didn't, lingering instead at 12% by December 2010 (eMarketer #123668).

Above is Gartner's Hype Cycle chart for 2006; you will love how tablet PCs sit at the bottom of the trough of disillusionment. Below are a few predictions made in 2006 or in early 2007.  

"Hitachi: Commercial Mind-Machine Interface by 2011" (Wired, November 2006)

"In 2011 you'll never have to clean your house again. Nanotechnology could soon allow you to sanitize your bathroom with a flip of a light switch." (PopSci, June 2006)

"446m Mobile Phone TV Users By 2011" (IMS Research in Digital LifeStyles, August 2006)

"Segments such as video game advertising, set to become a market worth close to $3 billion by 2011, will result in the further maturing of this industry." (ABI Research in Gamasutra, February 2006)

"By the end of 2011, 80 percent of active Internet users (and Fortune 500 enterprises) will have a “second life,” but not necessarily in Second Life." (Gartner in AdLab, April 2007)

"Online advertising will grow to represent 9 percent of overall advertising spending by 2011, and search will continue to be the driver of growth." (Jupiter in ClickZ, July 2006). Fact check: online advertising's share of total advertising spending was 15.3% in 2010 and is expected to grow to 20.5% this year (eMarketer, January 2011)

"Broadcast and cable TV will pick up $5 billion in revenue from new ad platforms by 2011. That’s the good news. The bad news is TV will lose $12 billion in traditional revenue over the same period, thanks to ad-skipping and other disruptive technologies." (Jupiter in Lost Remote, September 2006)

"By 2011, TV programming delivered over consumer broadband connections will be a "viable alternative to cable." (Forrester in eCommerce Times, January 2007)

"Already worth $1.4 billion this year, mobile porn will be worth nearly three times that much by 2011, or $3.3 billion." (Juniper in Pocket Lint, November 2006). Also, "most people who watch mobile porn are "lads down the pub" wanting to impress their friends, rather than hard core porn watchers."

"Shipments of the tiny [tablet] PCs could rise to 7.8 million units by 2011." (In-Stat in CNet, May 2006)

"When Chairman Bill Gates first outlined the notion of an ultramobile PC at a hardware conference last year, he talked about a device that would weigh less than 500 grams, have all-day battery life and could cost less than US$800, possibly as little as US$500." (CNet on Microsoft's Origami project, March 2006). See the Origami Project page on Microsoft's website (with devices scheduled to ship in 2008).

"By 2011, 28 million cars in the U.S. will be iPod-ready, up from just under one million in 2005." (Telematics in Motortrend, May 2006)

"Podcasting to Generate $400 Mil. in Ads by 2011." (eMarketer in MediaWeek, February 2007)

"Over the next five years video game advertising will grow at a compound annual growth rate of nearly 23%, reaching nearly $2 billion by 2011." (eMarketer in Gamasutra, April 2007). eMarketer's recent forecast for the year: $1.1B

 

Amex Centurion Statue in Farmville

Continuing to keep an eye on brands in Farmville:  American Express is letting its card holders to redeem reward points for Zynga's virtual goods (and Citi has just followed). Amex is also offering a special Centurion statue that will double the mastery for players' crops in Farmville for one week.

Previous promos in Farmville: Megamind, Farmers Insurance, McDonald's, peanuts.

 

AdLab in Snapshots

Explore the visual side of AdLab's archives with Blogger's cool newly released Snapshots view.

 

The Orbitwheel

New era for skateboard, maybe in the future skateboard is useless, the Orbitwheel is a brand new concept for wheeled sports. 

The design is simple: two feet, two wheels... and you're ready to go. The Orbitwheel's concept is basic, but with the wheels whirling around your feet, you are capable of countless tricks and maneuvers that can be as complex and creative as you can come up with.

With the Orbitwheel's minimalistic design, fun and transportation have never been so portable and convenient. The large wheel radius enables you to enjoy the Wheelblazer on a variety of different surfaces. The two thin, light wheels require no folding down or taking apart, making them easy to slip into a backpack or carry in your hand. And when you're ready to get going again, you don't need to fuss with buckles and flaps - just step into the hoops and take off.

 

 

The Coolest Bridge

The coolet bridge In Leeuwarden, Netherlands they enjoy the comforts of a robotic overlord controlling a road bridge. It looks less like a bridge than a giant transformer crouching next to the river, holding down a thin spatula of road surface. From the road lines on the bridge arm it looks like cars just drive over the entire surface of the thing. It’s a smart solution for a small bridge, even though its size is a bit ungainly, and they somehow thought painting cute post-modern pastel colors was interesting.

 
  

 

18 Hardcore Months In The Making, Glitch Is Ready To Roll

Starting next week, there’s a new massively multi-player online game launching in beta that you’re going to want to play. It’s called Glitch, and it’s been in the making for well over a year. From what I’ve seen, it will be well worth the wait.

Over a year ago, I sat down with Tiny Speck (the company behind Glitch) co-founder Stewart Butterfield to go over some of the aspects behind the game. A few days ago, we caught up again to go over how far they’ve come leading up to the beta.

“We’ve been going hardcore for the last 18 months,” Butterfield says of the Tiny Speck team. “But only in the last four months have things gotten much clearer,” he continues. While they initially expected to launch in beta late last year, it has taken a bit longer than anticipated. But now he feels they’re ready to roll, undoubtedly helped by a big new influx of funding and a lot of new employees (they’re up to 22 now — minus former design lead Daniel Burka who moved on, but remains involved, Butterfield notes).

For the past six months, they’ve been testing Glitch with a select group of users for about a day every week. At most, there have been about 250 people at any given time testing it out. But with the beta, Butterfield expects to ramp that number up to 1,000 quickly. And the virtual world will be open about half of the time.

He expects the beta period to last anywhere from eight to fourteen weeks and over that time, they’ll let in the “tens of thousands” of users who have signed up to get early access (we have some cut-the-line invites below). They’ll be using a RockMelt-style invite system in which users are given invites and can easily see which of their friends want one.

In terms of the technology they’ve built to power the game, Butterfield seems most proud of the fact that they’ve brought a web-oriented approach towards software development to the game. He walked me through a bit of the backend to show me just how easy it is to tweak elements of the game on the fly, and to add new things.

A series of drop-down menus and pre-set data inputs makes this all possible. And it will allow Glitch to deploy in minutes what it has traditionally taken MMOs days or weeks to get out to their community. It will also allow for designers to push changes without having to bug the engineers.

The game itself is running on Amazon’s EC2 system. Butterfield notes that the biggest issue with that is the inter-sever traffic, but he says his team has engineered around many of those issues. They plan to stay on EC2 indefinitely partially due to what Butterfield learned with his previous startup, Flickr. “As a team we previously had to deal with storage requirements. If that can be someone else’s problem entirely, it’s better,” he says.

(He does acknowledge that at some point, assuming they grow quickly, it will make economic sense to have their own servers.)

The game itself is built entirely in Flash, which Butterfield notes can be a pain at times. But to get the polished look-and-feel that Glitch has, HTML5 simply is nowhere close where it needs to be, he says. “Maybe a couple years from now, but not now,” he says.

One of the most interesting aspects of Glitch is that they’ll have an API from day one that third-party developers can use to expand upon the game. In fact, some already are. Developers will be able to access Glitch characters that users create and do things such as modify them outside of the game, Butterfield says.

Eventually, this API is going to lead Glitch’s mobile approach as well. Because of the reliance on Flash, a mobile version of the game is unlikely anytime soon, but developers can come up with mini-games using the API, he notes. Butterfield says they’ll likely commission outside developers to do cool things on mobile devices and split revenues with them.

So where are the revenues going to come from? Glitch’s model is to be free for everyone, but they’ll have a subscription layer for the more hardcore players. These subscribers will have access to special features such as different character accessories.

There will also be in-game purchase options. Using a system Tiny Speck has built, users will be able to buy credits for something like 5.5 cents to 7.5 cents each. These can be used to buy power-ups and do things like teleportation to other areas in the game. Butterfield is quick to say though that they don’t want to make it easy for players to simply buy success.

PayPal payments should also be an option down the road. And eventually, Butterfield expects Facebook Credits to be a big part — Facebook still has to open these for use outside of their in-app ecosystem.

One thing that has surprised Butterfield so far is that while males make up the vast majority of the early testers, it’s females that are the most active players. This may speak well to the game’s appeal to a wide-range of players, as some of the most popular online games have similar ratios.

Again, while Glitch will launch in beta in a few days, there will still be a gradual roll-out to begin with. However, we’ve convinced them to give us 111 invites to cut the access line and get in front. So click this link and enter your email addresses quickly.

Update: And the invites are gone — in under 10 minutes, apparently there’s a lot of interest in this game.

 

MYA Cosmetic Surgery

Many people do not like some parts of their bodies. This can affect their confidence which can impact on their love life, career and general happiness. In the modern world now, plastic surgery is very acceptable, many articles, sites and television discussion about plastic surgery and is set to continue to grow. Top Eight Cosmetic Surgery Procedures are breast enlargement, breast reductions, liposuction, eyelid surgery, face and neck lifts, tummy tuck and rhinoplasty (nose corrective surgery). Top Five Non-surgical Procedures are Laser and IPL Skin Rejuvenation, Dermal Fillers, Botulinum Toxin (Botox), Chemical Peels, Microdermabrasion.

Make Yourself Amazing (MYA) is the most experienced and skilled surgeons in the world, MYA are breast enhancement specialists who also offer the full range of surgical and non-surgical procedures. Each of MYA’s surgeons has carried out hundreds, and thousands, of cosmetic surgery procedures. This allows the ‘MYA surgeons’ to offer the best advice and to be able to produce amazing results. 

One of the many plastic surgeries was breast reduction surgery, many women do not feel comfortable having very large breasts, bad posture and embarrassment. Having very large breasts can cause the spine and breast pain. Breast reduction surgery can help restore proportion to your body.

 

Jack Dorsey Is A Real Man, For A Good Cause

DNA, Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher’s foundation for sex trafficking awareness, has launched its social media campaign this week, “Real Men Don’t Buy Girls.” If you get past the absurdity of their ads (and they are absurd on so many levels) and visit the DNA Facebook page you’ll encounter some shocking statistics about the prostitution industry. For example, over 12 million people are currently sex slaves around the world and the average age of entry into sex slavery is 13 years old.

Moore and Kutcher’s solution? Raise awareness and take action, like reporting any suspicious ads you see on Craigslist or Backpage.

In order to spread the word, the actress and actor/angel investor have leveraged their Hollywood connections to get Justin Timberlake, Sean Penn, Bradley Cooper, Jamie Foxx and even “Old Spice Guy” Isaiah Mustafa to make these silly silly videos. Notable personalities like media cyclone Arianna Huffington have also added their visages to the mix (she’s at the end of Kutcher’s video).

Where Dorsey comes is in that DNA has actually partnered with tech companies like Twitter, Facebook and Microsoft in order to come up with ways to reduce the 76% of sex trade transactions that take place online. Microsoft for example is working on something called Photo DNA, which identifies and tags pornographic images, allowing service providers to remove all their replications simultaneously.

The initiative also includes a Facebook campaign which allows users to have their picture added to the gallery of “Real Men” and “Women Who Prefer Real Men,” as well as take part in the video. I really wish they would rig it so Eva Langoria would say my name though, just like they did with Dorsey. I’d love to hear her try to pronounce “Tsotsis.”

Kutcher is an investor in Flipboard, Blekko, Path and  Zaarly among other other things.

 

USB Flash Drive Watch

Another unique USB flash drive for you, the Secret USB Flash Drive Watch comes with a tiny 4 GB USB flash drive cleverly concealed inside the body of the device,Simply remove, add data and then re-insert and you’re ready to conduct secret missions to building B on the other side of campus. This watch has a plastic case covered by stainlesssteel mask with brushed silver finish and convex mineral glass with shiny raised index. The USB flash drive fits flush with the watch case – ready to hold your data safe and secure.

Now all it takes is a bit of ugly gadget know-how and $49.99.

 

Digby Lands $8 Million To Help Retailers Power Mobile Commerce

Digby, which helps retailers design, deploy and manage mobile commerce web sites and rich applications optimized for smartphones, has raised $ 8 million in Series C funding led by Battery Ventures with RIM’s BlackBerry Partners Fund, S3 Ventures and Daylight Partners participating in the round. This brings the startup’s total funding to $ 16 million.

Digby’s Mobile Commerce product helps retailers create mobile websites that display rich product images and live catalogs, expands the ways they can buy from merchants and more. Digby also allows retailer to create native applications for iOS, BlackBerry and Android devices. Digby has a number of well-known retailers using its offering, including Costco, Toys “R” Us, The Home Depot, Lilly Pulitzer, and 1-800-Flowers.

The startup also recently landed a deal with AT&T to power the telecommunications giant’s mobile commerce software platform for developers.

The new funds will be used to expand global operations including sales, marketing, client services, research and platform development, and for new client acquisitions. As mobile commerce ramps up, there’s no question that more retailers will be looking to platforms like Digby to create a seamless mobile shopping experience for consumers. Digby could also be an acquisition target for a retail giant like eBay, so it should be interesting to see how the company performs in the coming year.

 

iPhone 4 About To Be Flickr’s Top Camera. Point & Shoots? Pretty Much The Opposite.

What’s the most popular camera used in terms of pictures taken that are uploaded to Flickr? Right now, it’s the Nikon D90. But in about a month or so, it will be Apple’s iPhone 4. What’s amazing is that D90 is nearly three years old. The iPhone 4 is not even a year old. Just look at a the chart above. The rise has been spectacular.

But it’s hardly the first time an iPhone has risen this quickly. Back in 2009, the iPhone overtook the Canon EOS Digital Rebel XTi as the most popular camera on Flickr. The difference is that at the time, Flickr was counting all the iPhone models together. That meant the original iPhone, the iPhone 3G, and the iPhone 3GS were all clumped together to overtake the Canon model. Now they’re split up, and the iPhone 4 alone is still going to be the most popular camera on Flickr in under a year. It’s pretty remarkable, really.

It also speaks to just how badly Flickr has dropped the ball with regard to mobile. We’ve previously delved into this topic when recounting a former Yahoo employee talking about how Flickr should have built a service like Instagram, but simply couldn’t due to bureaucracy. Flickr has long had the data to show that smartphone cameras were starting to dominate the market, but they really didn’t do anything about it.

The chart below is even more interesting. The “popular” point & shoot camera are all tanking, quickly. You’d think there would be one that is still doing well, but when compared to the high end (SLR) market and the smartphone market, they’re in a total nosedive. This will only get worse. As we’ve also previously written, the point & shoots have also totally dropped the ball with regard to the social photo revolution — they’ve committed seppuku.

Six months ago, the data looked bad for point & shoots. Now it looks downright frightening. If the trend continues (and it’s actually speeding up), the point & shoot is finished.

Flickr’s data obviously isn’t absolute. But they do have a wide range of users who are interested in photography uploading to their site. And the main disclaimers they give about their data is that smartphone data may actually be under-represented. So yes, it’s not looking good for point & shoots.

And if you were to lump all the iPhone models together, they would be so far ahead of every other camera that the graph would look absurd. This is the state of photography right now. And it’s going to continue in this direction.

While Android has overtaken the iPhone in terms of market share, none of their individual phone models are doing particularly well from a photo-taking perspective. It’s hard to say why this is — lack of a good Flickr Android app, or just because there are so many different model? But with the iPhone 5 now not likely launching until the fall, the iPhone 4 will have plenty of time to sit on the crown and expand upon it.

Flickr, meanwhile, will have plenty of time to contemplate what they missed out on in the mobile photo revolution happening on their own charts. And the point & shoots will have plenty of time to bleed.

(As an interesting sidenote: note how Apple is actually the least popular of the camera brands on Flickr. Is it because they only have four models? Or is Flickr’s data just wrong? Also worth noting: the iPad 2 is not doing well as a camera in terms of Flickr pictures. No surprise there — it’s simply not good for still image capture.)

 

Touchscreen Watch Phone

LG release a futuristic gadgets that LG GD910, LG's touchscreen phone watch. There’s a pretty low-grade camera but its 3G HSDPA compatibility, 1.43” touchscreen, MP3 player and text to speech functionality makes it a decent phone and a pretty hot watch. It also packs in bluetooth (so you can look even more spy-like with a headset), MMS and it’s water resistant. 

Source

 

Mad Men Barbie

There goes my lunch money. Betty, Don, Joan and Roger for $75 each in a special fashion doll collection by Mattel.

 

Two Alternative Verizon iPhone Commercials

Long before yesterday's Verizon iPhone teaser aired on TV, fans had begun cutting their own ads in anticipation of the great day, some as early as April of last year. Below are the two best ones.

I need service, demands a half-naked girl:

We've got three words:

If you are lucky, you'll fall into a time-space warp and see an AT&T ad for its iPhone served by Google at the end of the second spot for Verizon, like so:

 

Coolest Bluetooth Bracelet

Just use the Bluetooth bracelet as you would a normal Bluetooth device if you missed a few calls on your cell phone because it was on silent mode or you just didn't hear your mobile phone ring. it is very simple and very straight forward to use. The Bluetooth bracelet vibrates when you receive calls and displays the caller ID's number so you can decide whether or not you want to fish your phone out of your pocket or bag. If you are too busy to take calls then just press the function button to reject the call, thereby allowing you to pay more attention to your meeting. This Bluetooth bracelet not only looks cool, but also makes your busy life just that much easier to handle. For now though, this design works, the look may be simplistic, but it’s not gaudy either. You can purchase it for $26.